Tag: Shazam

The Day Shazam Forgot

Alzheimer’s Research UK partners with Shazam and does something deliberately uncomfortable. It gives the app the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. You use Shazam as you normally would, but the experience starts to break in ways that mirror memory loss. It is a hard-hitting way to feel, in a small moment, what daily struggle can look like.

The insight behind the campaign is about who needs to be reached. Most people associate Alzheimer’s with late life, but the disease can affect people as young as 40. The post cites over 40,000 people under 65 living with dementia in the UK.

The point is education through friction

This does not try to persuade with claims or statistics alone. It turns education into a lived interaction. Shazam is familiar and fast. Making it unreliable becomes the message.

Why the Shazam choice is strategic

Shazam already sits in a high-frequency behaviour loop. People open it in real life moments. That makes it a powerful carrier for a message about everyday disruption, because it arrives inside everyday life rather than as a separate awareness film.

What to take from this if you build digital experiences

  • If you want people to understand an abstract condition, simulate a small part of the experience, not just the outcome.
  • Put the message inside a familiar behaviour, so the contrast is instantly felt.
  • Use disruption sparingly and intentionally, so the discomfort has a purpose and does not turn into irritation.

A few fast answers before you act

What is “The Day Shazam Forgot”?

A Shazam partnership campaign that simulates Alzheimer’s symptoms to give users a direct, hard-hitting insight into memory loss.

Who is the campaign trying to educate?

A younger audience that may assume Alzheimer’s only affects people in late life.

What key fact reframes the audience assumption?

The disease can affect people as young as 40. The post cites over 40,000 people under 65 living with dementia in the UK.

What is the core creative technique?

Turning a familiar app experience into a controlled failure state, so the message is felt rather than only read.

Coca-Cola: First Drinkable Advertising

You are looking at a Coke Zero ad on a billboard, on TV, in print, or even on radio. Instead of just watching it, you Shazam it. On your phone, Coke Zero appears to pour into a glass on-screen, and that moment converts into a free Coke Zero coupon you can redeem at select retail stores across the US.

The premise is blunt and smart. Many people think they know the taste of Coke Zero, but they actually do not. So Ogilvy & Mather creates a campaign where the quickest route from awareness to belief is not another claim. It is immediate trial.

How “drinkable” advertising is engineered

This execution turns Shazam into a universal call-to-action layer across media.

  • Any channel can trigger the experience. Billboard. TV. Print. Radio.
  • The smartphone becomes the conversion surface. Visual payoff first, then the coupon.
  • The coupon bridges straight into retail. “Try it now” becomes a physical action, not a brand sentiment.

The important part is not the novelty of animation. It is the end-to-end path from message to product-in-hand.

Why this works as shopper marketing, not just a stunt

The campaign is designed to reduce the classic friction points that kill trial.

  • No guessing what to do next. Shazam is the behaviour.
  • No abstract promise. The ad demonstrates “taste” by pushing you to the real thing.
  • No delayed gratification. The reward is immediate and concrete. A redeemable coupon.

It is experiential marketing that does not require a pop-up installation or a live event. The experience travels with the media buy.

In performance-led shopper marketing, the fastest path from awareness to belief is reducing trial friction and making redemption immediate.

The pattern to steal

If you are trying to drive trial at scale, this is a reusable model.

  1. Create a single interaction that works across channels.
  2. Use mobile to make the experience feel personal and immediate.
  3. Close the loop with a retail mechanic that is simple to redeem.

Do that well, and “engagement” stops being a vanity metric. It becomes a measurable bridge to purchase.

A few fast answers before you act

What makes this advertising “drinkable”?

Shazaming the ad triggers a mobile experience that ends in a free Coke Zero coupon. It is designed to turn exposure into real-world trial.

Why use Shazam in the first place?

It provides a consistent interaction across media formats, including channels where clickable links do not exist.

What business problem is this solving?

Driving immediate trial for a product where many people assume they already know the taste, but have not actually experienced it.

What is the key CX detail that makes it work?

A simple, familiar action. One step to trigger, then a clear reward that can be redeemed in-store.

The Sound of Amnesty

This year charity and human rights organization Amnesty International France has turned its signatures petition drive at www.marathondessignatures.com into a musical ‘hymn to freedom’ with Paris based agency La Chose.

The campaign was like any other petition drive, but with a slight difference. Every digital signature received released the next note of an exclusively written song called the Sound Of Amnesty. To push the boundaries, they even got music recognition service Shazam to promote their petition in their smartphone app.

When the Shazam app did not recognize a song, the usual error message along with a special message “Valentina Rosendo Cantu could not make herself heard either. Assaulted by soldiers, she asked for justice but the authorities refused to investigate” was displayed. As a result 150,000 signatures were collected, a 500% increase from the previous year! The song was also made into a CD and sent to Amnesty’s targeted authorities.